For several decades now, the tech industry has been able to get public recognition and external credit for the interesting ideas coming out of it. So much so that the startup concept of a “minimum viable product” got the same acronym — MVP — as Jalen Brunson (New York Forever).
But over this last decade, and especially in recent years, there has been a tremendous sea change in tech: MVPs, great ideas, and incredible teams no longer cut it for an external audience. Since the crypto industry in particular has been hit the hardest — with the combination of regulatory questions and headline-grabbing bad actors — it has heightened people’s BS meter as they increasingly got inundated with noise and began to filter accordingly.
And when traditional finance (TradFi) players take crypto seriously — like BlackRock launching a tokenized money market fund, Fidelity filing for a crypto ETF, JP Morgan settling transactions on a blockchain it built in-house — the conversation changes. Not just about what crypto is, but about what it takes to be taken seriously in the industry.
That’s the moment we’re in right now. This moment has quietly rewritten the rules for everyone building in this space.
Welcome to the “show me” era.
